Category: World Theology

Welcome to the Kingdom! It is an incredibly strange phenomenon that we find ourselves in, for the past 1300 years the Church has been largely a European religion/phenomenon. This however is quickly and radically changing, and the Church in the West is now a minority in terms of Christian population, so the question I have is why? Why is it that our view of Christianity remains so centralized and focused on the West? The story of God stepping into 1st Century Judea as a marginal Jewish Rabbi and Carpenter isn’t intrinsically European, however often we as Europeans have made it so, but as our grip on the hegemony of what it means to be Christian loosens so too should we be willing to listen to majority voices. But even more radically as we look at Paul’s vision for the Church in Gal 3:28 and elsewhere as we come to God we are transformed so that as a whole in community we might image the God of the margins. This means that we should value not just the voices from outside our current locale who make up a majority of Christianity today, but also to the margins even in our own society where we find diaspora and indigenous voices, the voices of those who have been uprooted, of the sojourner so that we might properly become strangers and exiles in this world.